Immigrant and Minority Entrepreneurship: The Continuous Rebirth of American Communities

Immigrant and Minority Entrepreneurship: The Continuous Rebirth of American Communities

Synopsis

Examines how immigrants and American minorities develop enterprises and create different degrees of economic stability.

Excerpt

John Sibley Butler and George Kozmetsky

This book is grounded in scholarship that looks at the contribution of newcomers to the economies of natio- states. Indeed, it has been argued that the impetus for the overall study of what we now call entrepreneurship lay in the attempt by scholars to understand how immigrants, or new members of societies, develop a sense of economic stability through the entrepreneurial process. In Georg Simmel’s groundbreaking work that appeared in the late 1800s, he called newcomers “strangers.” They were distinct ethnic groups who were not part of the established host society and thus came to play the merchant role. Max Weber, in his classic turn-of-the-century work, The Protestant Ethic andthe Spirit of Capitalism, paid attention to this population. His argument was that because of exclusion by nation-states, certain ethnic groups were forced into economic activity.

Present day research on immigrant entrepreneurship is a natural extension of these classic works. Although the concept of immigrant entrepreneurship has replaced that of stranger, the general theoretical question remains: How do newcomers create business activity for economic stability? Throughout American history, newcomers have been immigrants from foreign lands, the children of former slaves who were transported to America, and the first generation of large numbers of female entrepreneurs.